Technoscientific Angst

Ethics And Responsibility

Raphael Sassower

Publication Year: 1997

Reassesses the social and ethical situations of technoscientists. What responsibility do the Manhattan Project scientists have for the atomic devastation of Hiroshima? The Krupps scientists for the crematoriums at Auschwitz? Disturbing questions like these are at the heart of this book, a sobering exploration of scientific and intellectual responsibility. Raphael Sassower considers two related phenomena: the positive public image of science as the citadel of truth and objectivity and the angst displayed by scientists over their indirect roles in technological horrors. Largely unexamined, these circumstances provide the opportunity for a wholesale reassessment of the social and ethical situations of science and technology. In a world in which daily technological developments, from the space shuttle to genetic engineering, raise complex political and economic questions, this book provides a framework for assessing the social impact and ethical implications of scientific work. Is there no way, Sassower asks, to revisit the ideals of science-once devoted to creating a more reasonable and open society free from prejudices-when deciding the value of technoscientific projects and policies? His work suggests ways we can both preserve the benefits of enlightenment rationality (so-called scientific objectivity) and overcome the notion of science as our culture’s master narrative. Bringing the tools of postmodern philosophy and criticism to bear on Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the most brutal and incomprehensible instances of scientific modernism, Technoscientific Angst proposes that we change our scientific and philosophical perspectives on the modern world-that we bring them together in a novel and constructive way. 160 pages Translation rights: University of Minnesota Press

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Preface

The anguish of artists and poets is celebrated by societies that expect
justice and happiness in the future regardless of their current conditions.
Anguish is accepted and endorsed not so much as a judgment
about the present but as a means to envision and usher in a different
future. ...

1 Responsible Technoscience: The Haunting Reality of Auschwitz and Hiroshima

The commemoration in 1995 of the fiftieth anniversaries of two major
events of World War II, the liberation of Auschwitz (January 1945)
and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 1945),
invites us to use these events as starting points for self-examination. ...

2 Public Expectations of Technoscience: From Truth to Immortality

The first part of this chapter explores how we have voluntarily brought
ourselves into the modernist situation described in Chapter 1. It focuses
on the need for control of both the social and natural environments
through an authority one can believe in, an authority that deflects
superstition, dogma, and manipulation. ...

3 Ambiguity and Anxiety: The Making of Human Anguish

The first part of this chapter traces the human quest for order and the
traditional gratification of this desire through religious doctrine (this
parallels my examination of control in chapter 2). I then argue that
the technoscientific community continued in this tradition to accomplish
a similar goal of providing an ordered conception of the universe. ...

4 The Postmodern Option: A Dialectical Critique

In this chapter I examine the views expressed by the leaders and members
of the Manhattan Project concerning their personal responsibility
for the development of weaponry capable of the mass destruction of
human lives. In order to articulate these concerns I will probe three
sets of issues: ...

5 Responsible Technoscience: A Reconstruction

The requirement to address the great calamities of our century, as it
was raised in Chapter i, is reflected in the endemic condition of ambiguity,
anxiety, and anguish described in Chapters 2. and 3. The technoscientific
community is in need of a postmodernist dose of flexibility
and openness, as well as their consequence, responsibility, in order to
ensure its political integrity— ...

6 The Price of Responsibility: From Personal to Financial

This chapter attempts a difficult feat: to retain a postmodern orientation
in the ethical realm despite the limits of postmodernism. In other
words, I try to walk a tightrope that spans the abyss between absolutism
and relativism. As Bauman so eloquently says: ...

7 Cultural Changes: Agenda Setting

In order to ascribe responsibility to members of the technoscientific
community or to particular groups of leaders (political, military, or
academic) or to the (voting and nonvoting) public at large, it may be
helpful to rethink the notion of responsibility in its legal setting. ...

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